Brief Literary Genres and Their Misfits: Finite and Nontraditional Forms in the Short Fiction of Lydia Davis

This article analyses Lydia Davis's fiction in light of existing taxonomies of the short and very short story. It argues that Davis's narratives defy the fixity of genre norms through their reappropriation of some of the features that have been deemed defining characteristics of the short story and flash fiction. In order to examine her prose's bidirectional resistance of a fixed generic definition, the article focuses on Davis's relationship with finiteness and experimentation, emphasizing on the one hand her recurrent problematization of the material and diegetic bounds of textuality, and, on the other, her reappropriation of the epiphany and the twist-ending as prominent attributes of short fictional forms after modernism. Davis's aesthetic deviance from these changing taxonomies considered, this paper argues that her fiction demonstrates the growing insufficiency of genre norms in the literary and cultural milieux of the twenty-first century.